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E-40 f/ The Click “Captain Save A Hoe” (1994)

Produced by: Studio Ton

E-40: “‘Captain Save a Hoe’ was a person that's really like saving a broad—he pillow talking her, he's soft in the game. He'll do anything he can to try and get at this broad that got more miles on her than US Airways, ya smell me? [Laughs.] She done been around and he wanna be a rest haven and save her and turn her into a housewife, and he'll go all out his way, to get in her draws. He's the type of dude buying her clothes, cars, whatever he can do. So I wrote that cause it's a lot of my buddies out there that's Captain Save a Hoes. So we came with the heavy mobbed out bassline—that's mob music.

“So anyway to make a long story short, Studio Ton came up with the bassline to ‘Captain Save a Hoe,’ and I put my sister Suga T on there. I put B-legit in there, and D-Shot. The whole family was in there all vibing, the whole Sick Wid' It camp. I came with the title and my brother D-Shot was thinking of a hook. And D-Shot was like, ‘Man remember that song by Frankie Smith? It was called ‘Double Dutch Bus’?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah I remember.’ He was like, ‘We used to just ‘iz-i-iz-uh’—you know, speaking like that, in pig latin.’

“‘Uh-iz-I-iz-I-should I save her?’ And then Suga T came in there like, ‘I wanna be saved!’ We just started vibin’ and all of us came with the hook. D-Shot played the biggest part in the hook. I came with the concept. Everybody did their job. B-Legit gassed it. Suga gassed it. I gassed it. D gassed it.

“That song became a song that to this day people quote and use the word Captain Save a Hoe. We wasn't expecting ‘Captain Save a Hoe’ to be a big smash hit. We didn't know. It did its thing on the street, and it was to the point where it created a big enough street demand that the radio had to play it. So the radio was like, ‘Man you got a clean version of this?’ I was like, ‘No, but I can make one for you.’ [Laughs.] You can't say ‘ho’ on the radio so I had to change it to ‘Captain Save em Tho!’”